Heh, this is entertaining.
While Bill Nye argues for “in whose best interest is denial?” and brings up the ridiculous CO2 on Venus argument, Joe Bastardi runs circles around him with technical graphs and explanations on forcing factors and their magnitudes.
Warmists scream “weather is not climate!”. We need to shout back “Venus is not Earth!” since the Venusian atmosphere is entirely different in compositions and forcings, and we understand it far less than Earth’s.
Meanwhile, Bill O”Reilly seems more concerned about making his commercial break on time than saving the planet.
Nye needs a better argument, as Fox News viewers can see past the appeal to emotion. Bastardi while far more technically competent than Nye, needs to focus on explaining a bit about natural cycles, since few viewers would know what the “PDO” is.
A caveat for both men, doing live TV debate by the seat of your pants is tough. You can’t see each other, and you are communicating via earpiece audio. Live TV is never easy, live via satellite interlinks is even tougher.
Watch the segment => here.
h/t to WUWT reader “pwl”
Both Mars and Venus have atmospheres that are mostly CO2. There is a 500 degree C difference in their surface temperatures. That difference is due in part to the massive difference in surface pressure – Venus having a surface pressure about 10,000 times that of Mars.
Ed Snack (23:43:50) :
It does seem that the official spin that all true believers have been apparently instructed to use in debates is the “Who’s funding this lot, OMG it’s Big Oil and Big Tobacco, they’re all evil !”
You know how if you are being accosted on the street by a panhandler. You see him coming up and you want to avoid it so you preemptively ask him for a quarter. He says no, and that’s the end of it.
I did a variation of this on the bad astronomy blog. I had my argument but instead of launching right into it I started out with
“Who owns Discover Magazine?”
Then my argument.
Several of their commenters went right to the google to find out who the publisher is, rather then devote any time fishin for applicable Jim Hansen quotes or Joe Romm links to pelt my real arguments with, including Phil Phlait himself.
This, of course, hyper-underlines the potential problems with “debates”.
The whole concept of the “science” is so complex, and fraught with the potential to misunderstand or mis-state the current state of play.
A “debate” which degenerates to each side of the philosophical question yabbering their own “talking points” is not a debate IMHO.
A true debate acknowledges (and attempts to destroy) the opponent’s argument. In the current scientific void, the “debate” is no such thing – rather, each protagonist sets forth their pet “talking points”, and unless those particular points have been thoroughly reamed by scientific thought, they remain in stasis, despite the best efforts of the opponent.
Clearly, the parameters of the debate have to be narrowed, in order to give voice to the dissenters and denialists. This means that “narrow” issues have to be the topic du jour (e.g. Arctic Ice extent/melt) as opposed to every single piece of scientific study relevant to Arctic Ice over the last 500 or more years.
Can we have a “real” debate, on specific issues?
Luboš Motl (23:37:42) wrote “Bill Nye seems to be saying all the same stuff all the time, based on authorities and statements known to be wrong.” This hits the nail right on the head as to where the warmists are fighting a rearguard action to save their religion. Just take a look at the sciencedaily news and item after item starts or contains all the ifs and buts about sea level rises etc. Most of these ifs and buts have been disproved so why are these false claims not picked up and questioned ? If supposedly intelligent people can continue to publish guesswork as science then Nye et al will continue to get airtime.
Funny that nobody mentions good ol´Mars with its atmosphere composed of 95% CO2. Maybe because of the fact, that its theoretical and actual temperature is the same, about 210K. Hint: its atmospheric pressure is very low, unlike extremely high atmospheric pressure on Venus and medium one on Earth.
Mere existence of the atmosphere creates an insulating blanket, since it keeps the day warmth during the night and brings warmer air from the south during the winter, not speaking about oceans as the main heat sinks. All the “greenhouse theory” just tries to assign this effect to some hypothetical radiation diagrams.
[snip]
Never trust a guy with a bowtie. Just sayin’.
And Venus would be much different with water vapor. A good comet smack would completely change things.
“extract the data from the trend” at 3:09 … nice 🙂
Venus may have a hot climate but at least its a stable one. I guess even with an atmosphere which is 96% CO2 and twice as thick and dense as the Earth’s atmosphere it STILL hasn’t reached that mythical tipping point.
Estimates of the effects of CO2 concentrations on air temperature are often – as mentioned before – derived from conditions on Venus. If one assumed that the atmosphere of Venus was similar to that of the earth, rather than being 95% CO2, and that it still had a pressure of 90 bar, then the surface temperature would be about 660°C, i.e. about 200°C more than at present. The difference arises from the somewhat smaller k value for triatomic as against biatomic gases (k Air: 1.4; k CO2: 1.3).
Thus it would actually be somewhat colder on earth if our atmosphere consisted of CO2 rather than air.
http://freenet-homepage.de/klima/error.htm
That debate was disturbingly poorly communicated. I think the points made were somewhat mistakenly chosen by both sides because there was not enough time to detail what they were talking about. Something simple such as just stating that we know CO2 is a greenhouse gas but then illustrating how much the entire world would need to output to increase the temperature by 1 degree given we know CO2 has about 1.7watts/M^2 would have been more interesting. Then articulating why we argue about the positive feedbacks and what the latest evidence is etc as well as misconceptions and what the latest ‘arguments’ have been or logical ways of interpreting the IPCCC models.
I don’t respect O’Reilly one shred, he is a moronic shill and has constantly been an opinion journalist. This world is so mixed up when Republicans (who claim theyre just objective journalists) are presenting the counter side to an important debate which offsets the attempt at malevolent mass mind control of the population.. but to me this is by pure happenstance. Also, the science guy didn’t even talk about science.. he made an apples to oranges comparison about Venus which was a total slam dunk to call him intentionally dishonest.. he must think the viewers are extremely dense (although they are so what am I talking about?.. I suppose he picked the right way of communicating after all).
Sorry to all the people who like O’Reilly but truly, the network is a joke, so is MSNBC, they’re all advocates. I watch on occasion just to find out how laughable the ‘news’ is lately, plus its quite evil but i like to laugh at stupidity sometimes.
WUWT wins because it actually is objective, please don’t change! It’s so rare.
Same tired old warmists arguments. AGW is real because there’s “overwhelming evidence”, it’s the warmist decade on record, Venus is hot enough to melt lead. The more I listen to this stuff, the more entrenched I become in my scepticism.
AGW is built on a lie: CO2. It absorbs all the IR now and it absorbed all the IR then. There is no difference. That’s the end game for CO2 and once you understand how they have to resort to INFERRENCE (as Bill Nye did with his multiple graphs), the quicker it becomes obvious. Apparently Bill hasn’t examined his core assumption; if he did, he wouldn’t be shilling for AGW anymore.
There’s one big theory (AGW) and it is based on that one big lie. Nothing else really matters.
(It is obvious from this No Spin segment, however, that the science isn’t settled. Far from it. But again, it could be settled very quickly if everybody just concentrated on and recognized the One Big Lie. GW is alive; AGW is dead.)
James Hansen’s PhD disertation was on the Venusian atmosphere and the “Venusian Greenhouse Effect”. After that inspiration he transfered Venus to Earth giving birth to Al Gore and AGW. As an old math advisor once told me, “all you need is one new idea to get your PhD”. Hansen at least had one idea which made him a millionaire.
Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer who’s best claim seems to be he studied under a fellow named Carl Sagan. Perhaps it was Sagan that started him on his entertainment career? Regardless, he’s reasonably good at teaching first and second graders and obviously that’s were he should stay, if he’s smart. If he’s heavily invested in the carbon tax, trading, etc., expect to see him on that popular network, CNN.
Note on the google ad “outrageous Bachmann”: Never heard of Tarryl Clark before she chose to run, that in the middle of her stomping ground.
I’ll bet it’s free google activism following Supreme’s support of corporate free speech.
Good luck with that.
It’s a real shame. I used to enjoy his show. Even as an adult I found it entertaining and educational. I don’t remember him pushing an environmental or warmist agenda back then.
I actually saw the segment last night when it was aired. He offered the usual circular arguments, a non-sequitur about Venus and cited the IPCC as if he’s been in a coma the past four months.
Last night PBS had a long story (~3-4 minutes) on the admission of a mistake about the rate of glacier melting by the UN’s IPCC [5:30 pm here in Cape Girardeau, MO].
Although the story was mostly in defense of the concept of global warming and the UN’s IPCC, it was the first time that I have heard an admission of major error about global warming on any major news media.
Many good, intelligent citizens – including personal friends – are absolutely convinced about the truth of global warming, but the Climategate iceberg is steadily melting away to expose decades of deceit and data manipulation in our federal research agencies.
Keep up the good work, Anthony.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space SCiences
Former NASA PI for Apollo
It’s amazing how many AGW believers seem to ignore a very basic fact about CO2 greenhouse warming. They seem to assume that if you have lots of CO2, as with Venus, then you will have lots of warming. Of course, that simply isn’t true. It’s a classic case of the law of diminishing returns. As you increase CO2 the warming soon reaches saturation, when all the available windows in the infra red are fully blocked. However much more CO2 you add, there is negligible extra warming.
With this in mind, it seems unlikely that the Venusion hothouse is due primarily to CO2. I suspect the extraordinarily thick Venusian is the prime reason and that CO2 has little effect.
As far as I’m aware, no one has been able to prove that the climate on Earth was driven by CO2 in any epoch of Earth’s history. When the Earth is warmer there will be more CO2, due to the action of the oceans. As proven by the ice cores going back 600,000 years, CO2 is driven by the climate, and not the other way around.
Chris
When people scream Venus I scream Mars with its atmosphere of CO2 making up 95.32%. (Use a silly argument against a silly argument, forgot how it’s in Greek).
The radiative effect cannot be given an empirical value because the only way to find it is with computer models and not by experiment. Scientifically it is not significant and technically therefore, does not exist. Some say the concept violates accepted laws of physics given it is a trace gas and the effect attributed to it.
CO2 is not a trace gas on Venus so the ‘blanket effect’ of Greenhouse, ‘transfer of heat between layers of fluid of different densities’ may have some relation to said gas (on Venus). On Earth CO2 is once again … insignificant at 0.04% and therefore technically … it does not influence anything including climate.
CO2 is only food for plants and a biological trigger for aerobic respiration for beings on Earth and it is well below levels that life on Earth evolved in. Some say due to natural sequestering and the efficiency of plant life scrubbing it from the atmosphere, we will never return to paleo levels.
I think Joe Bastardi did great!
His “one hair on de bridge” CO2 argument and his reference that we now see the weather patterns of the seventies can be understood by everybody.
Who cares what the climate on Venus is?
Thanks for posting this one, as it will give me a chance to see the debate. From most of the responses above, it seems that it went pretty much as one would expect.
Venus? Unbelievable that any attempt would be made to use it to support AGW.
Watch for Inhofes “Minority Report” coming out this morning. http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-and-the-law-senator-inhofe-to-ask-for-congressional-criminal-investigation-pajamas-mediapjtv-exclusive/
The air at the surface of Venus is 80 or 90 Earth atmospheres. I can’t remember which.
I do know this, that diesel engines operate at 25 to 1 compression ratio.
Imagine standing inside a diesel piston as on it’s up stroke. Now multiply by 3 and a half.
That’s Venus. It doesn’t matter much what the air is made of.
I’m actually rather ashamed for/of Bill Nye – I used to love the fact that his show (and Beakman’s World) tried to make science approachable for kids. Now, though, I don’t think I’d let my kids be in the same county as Nye (if I had any kids).